ScaleIO SAN - Great for VMware, Not so great for SQL Server

Hello, we have a new miniseries coming up, we haven't decided on formats (Blog, Youtube, podcast...) but, we've recently gained a good deal of experience working with various SANs in virtualized environments, and their performance implications on SQL server. In fact, we've gone and built at test system with 5-node ScaleIO, 10 NVMe SSDs, 10 SATA SSDs and two late-model Xeon servers to form a cluster, desinged bunch of experiments to answer a lot of specific questions - like How does SAN compare to classic RAID? Does high IOPS matter? How good is NVMe SSD over SATA SSD? Is it true that SAN-hosted SQL tends to deadlock more? and so on.....what we found is really interesting, and this knowledge is worth sharing with the world. So, stand by...

Here's a sneak peek. How do you think this SAN would perform a basic SQL server workload? The answer: worse than a single laptop with Samsung 850 PRO SSD running Developer Edition SQL on i7, and through experiments we were able to identify the reason: Latency. This is despite the fact that we used low-latency champ of all connectivity, Infiniband. We even used dedicated HCAs for SDC traffic and SDS traffic, so we'd say it's not a terrible setup. In fact it ran file servers and virtual machines with power to spare...it just doesn't do SQL server well. Stay tuned to find out more!